You get given the bonus mission on the second visit to Hengsha, the grenade launcher is the reward for completing the mission. The remote explosive device and the unlocking device are found in your apartment and you can buy more from vendors. The mission itself is fairly short, it consists of about four rooms and some sewer tunnels, personally I wouldn't bother buying it separately.

It's a sandbox building/exploring/survival game, you get dumped into a randomly generated infinite* world and have to mine resources and use them to craft tools and create buildings while trying to avoid being killed by the nasties that come out at night. This video gives a decent introduction:

One reason for all secure sites to come up with a certificate error is that some part of your connection has been compromised. Of course it's far, far more likely that your Firefox install is screwed up but you never know, I wouldn't recommend using any important secure sites until you get the problem sorted though.

I don't know the odds of the level cap items dropping, all I can tell you is that I got the one that upped my level cap from 4 to 8 while I was still level 3. They can also be bought in the in-game store for 50 points, by the time I'd hit level 4 I'd earned 125 points just through completing quests. I presume they get rarer at higher levels but they certainly aren't a barrier to playing for free.

> Pay for levels, pay to unlock powers, pay to unlock feats, pay to unlock classes, pay to get access to dungeons

I've been playing on and off since it went free and as far as I'm aware the only one of those that requires payment is extra dungeons (about a third of them are free). Level cap increases and classes can be bought but they can also be earned by playing the game.

Personally I hope all MMOs adopt this model, the hardcore can continue to subscribe at the usual cost, more casual and/or pennypinching players such as myself can just spend the odd bit here and there (I haven't spent a single penny yet but if I continue to play I'm sure I'll end up buying something), and everyone else gets to demo the game for as long as they like. Assuming the developers still turn a profit, it's win/win.

As for the Cyanide game I'm waiting for the retail release. Hopefully by then they'll have fixed the bugs and brought the price down to a sensible level (I don't know about other currencies but the UK price is currently 60% above the usual price for new games).

In case anyone else had the problem I mentioned before, the game installs to Program Files then tries to write files there which doesn't work unless you're admin, I changed the game's file permissions to work around it.

Just to make it clear, you're not paying for beta, you're buying the final version in advance and getting full access to the beta as part of that and a) getting the game cheaper, b) getting to play (the beta) earlier, and c) helping fund development.